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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg
What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg
Journal Articles
In a recent critique, Jens Ohlin faults contemporary criminal law textbooks for emphasizing philosophy, history and social science at the expense of doctrinal training. In this response, we argue that the political importance of criminal law justifies including reflection about the justice of punishment in the professional education of lawyers. First, we argue that both understanding and evaluating criminal law doctrine requires consideration of political philosophy, legal history, and empirical research. Second, we argue that the indeterminacy of criminal law doctrine on some fundamental questions means that criminal lawyers often cannot avoid invoking normative theory in fashioning legal arguments. Finally, …
Theorizing American Freedom (Reviewing Aziz Rana, The Two Faces Of American Freedom (2010)), Anthony O'Rourke
Theorizing American Freedom (Reviewing Aziz Rana, The Two Faces Of American Freedom (2010)), Anthony O'Rourke
Book Reviews
This is a review essay of The Two Faces of American Freedom, by Aziz Rana. The book presents a new and provocative account of the relationship between ideas of freedom and the constitutional structure of American power. Through the nineteenth century, Rana argues, America’s constitutional structure was shaped by a racially exclusionary, yet economically robust, concept that he calls “settler freedom.” Drawing on the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of settler colonial studies, as well as on the vast historical literature on civic republicanism, Rana contends that the concept of settler freedom necessitated a constitutional framework that enabled rapid territorial expansion and …
Restoring Justice To Civil Rights Movement Activists?: New Historiography And The “Long Civil Rights Era”, Athena D. Mutua
Restoring Justice To Civil Rights Movement Activists?: New Historiography And The “Long Civil Rights Era”, Athena D. Mutua
Athena D. Mutua
The paper engages ongoing discussions about the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. This Project has been organized to support efforts to rectify and account for the tremendous cost to civil rights activists and supporters of participating in the civil rights movement. These efforts include, for instance, fresh prosecutions against perpetrators of old hate crimes, including cases against the killers of Medger Evers and the three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers. The question the paper asks is: what do Project participants mean when they talk about the civil rights era? The short answer is that the Project organizers initially conceptualized the …
The Slavery Of Emancipation, Guyora Binder
The Slavery Of Emancipation, Guyora Binder
Journal Articles
The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes the institution of slavery rather than freeing individual slaves. Yet it quickly came to stand for little more than granting universal rights to make labor contracts and to leave service. This article develops a distinction between abolishing an institution and reclassifying individuals within it. Drawing on the comparative history of slavery, it shows that the institution of slavery has generally included mechanisms for the manumission of slaves and their passage into a liminal status combining self-ownership with social subordination and relative isolation. A critical account of the Antelope litigation shows that proponents of mass manumission still …